1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a method for multimedia playing. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method for instant on multimedia playing.
2. Description of Related Art
The techniques of directly playing audio CDs by notebook computers have been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,279,506 “Computer system capable of playing audio CDs in CD-ROM drive independent of an operating system”. However, with the conventional techniques, the function of playing the audio CDs can only be performed when the hardware design of the notebook computer has been modified extensively. Additionally, in the conventional techniques, the program for playing the audio CDs, which is stored in a read only memory (ROM), shares the memory map space with the basic input/output system read only memory (BIOS ROM). The method disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,279,506 uses the ROM solely for the program playing the audio CDs. And the program can play only audio CDs. In addition, the memory map space of the BIOS ROM has a limited memory space. If playback of other types of multimedia CDs, such as digital versatile discs (DVDs), is implemented with the techniques disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,279,506, the size of the playback program would be larger than the shared memory map space of the BIOS ROM. This is an obvious defect of U.S. Pat. No. 6,279,506.
Additionally, when playing multimedia CDs in the environment of a traditional windows operating system, such as the Microsoft Windows operating system, all the hardware resources of a notebook computer are usually activated. Therefore, when the user is watching a multimedia program, hardware of the notebook computer irrelevant to the playing of multimedia CDs is also consuming electric power, causing unnecessary power waste and shortening the time available to the user for watching multimedia programs.
Additionally, the U.S. Pat. No. 6,279,506 does not disclose how to enable the computer to play multimedia in an operating system, such as the Microsoft Windows operating system, when the computer enters a stand-by mode (S3) or a sleep mode (S4).
In view that the defects of the conventional techniques described above have to be improved, the inventor of this application proposes a method for instant on multimedia playing and a computer that implements the method to solve the defects of the conventional techniques.